Wal-Mart, Starbucks, Aetna’s pay hikes: Why now?

Last week, it was TJX, the parent of T.J. Maxx and Marshalls. The previous week: Wal-MartWMT. Before that, it was Aetna, Starbucks, and Gap. One by one, corporate America suddenly seems inclined to lift its workers’ wages.

The question is, why?

Perhaps because Wal-Mart is the nation’s largest employer, with 1.3 million people on its U.S. payroll, its move has been the most heavily scrutinized, with observers trying to unearth the company’s true motive, the way Kremlinologists used to parse a decree from the Soviet Politburo.

Wal-Mart itself has stressed that the pay increase—which will raise its workers’ minimum wage from as little as $7.25 an hour to $9 in April and $10 next year—is just one part of an overall package that includes enhanced training and improved scheduling. The intention, says CEO Doug McMillon, is to “reignite the sense of ownership” that Wal-Mart’s employees have for the business so that, in turn, they’ll provide a better experience for customers.

Many economists, meanwhile, have suggested that Wal-Mart’s action is a simple and straightforward response to a tighter labor market. As the recovery from the Great Recession continues, offering workers more dough should help fill open vacancies and reduce employee turnover.

Others have maintained that the company, which is fiercely anti-union, succumbed to pressure applied by employees who have started to organize under the OUR Walmart banner.

But the most intriguing possible explanation for Wal-Mart’s decision to boost its workers’ pay comes from labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein, author of The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business. As he sees it, Wal-Mart may be starting to realize that unless corporate America sticks more money in people’s pockets, overall consumer spending isn’t going to hold up over the long run—and that’s going to be bad for the entire economy.

Whether Lichtenstein is right or not about Wal-Mart, there is evidence that more companies are worried about the fact that workers’ wages have been stagnant for decades. Last fall, just before the holidays, a study by the Center for American Progress found that 68% of the top 100 U.S. retailers had cited falling or flat incomes among consumers as risks to their business in their latest federal financial filings. That was double the number of companies that sounded such an alarm in 2006.

Lichtenstein notes that Wal-Mart in recent years has blamed rising payroll taxes that have cut into its customers’ purchasing power for its disappointing earnings. “They’re very sensitive to these things,” he says, adding that it’s not a huge stretch to see wage stagnation having the same fundamental effect.

Of course, it is farfetched to think that a wage boost by any one company can deliver significant economic ripples. “Even Wal-Mart is not going to change very much” in terms of the big picture, says Larry Summers, the Harvard professor and former Treasury secretary. Much more effective, he says, are broad-based policies such as government-mandated increases to the minimum wage and measures that strengthen industry-wide collective bargaining.

It’s worth remembering, though, that for a long time, some of the nation’s leading executives openly argued that businesses needed to pay their workers enough to keep the consumer economy humming.

The most oft-cited example is Henry Ford, who in 1914 famously doubled his workers’ wages to $5 a day. His employees thus became much more productive and far less inclined to quit. Summers, who has written about Ford’s gambit, says it makes sense that Wal-Mart would be looking to receive similar benefits today.

Yet Ford’s raise had wider ramifications. “Prosperous workers begat a prosperous marketplace, which in turn spawned more prosperous companies and in time the result was a new, conspicuously consumer-based economy,” Douglas Brinkley writes in Wheels for the World, his chronicle of Henry Ford and his company.

As the Roaring Twenties gave way to the Great Depression, some wished even more companies had followed Ford F. Had profits been “distributed in wages, prosperity would have been maintained and increased,” the publishing baron William Randolph Hearst declared in 1931.

Edward Filene, the department-store entrepreneur, was equally adamant. “Low wages . . . are as bad for employers as they are for employees,” he asserted in 1936.

Eventually, with World War II underway, the economy began to soar. But the same logic about consumers held. “How am I going to sell my refrigerators if we don’t give ’em wages to buy with?” General Electric President Charlie Wilson asked in late 1944.

When Time magazine named General Motors President Harlow Curtice its Man of the Year in 1955, it highlighted the impressive wage gains made by GM workers. “People have got money,” the head of the largest department store in Flint, Mich., told Time. “They feel safe.” The Ad Council touted the era as one of “people’s capitalism.” Among the hallmarks of this concept were “high wages, high productivity, high purchasing power,” according to a two-page spread in Harper’s in 1956.

By the early 1970s, Americans had enjoyed a remarkable run of growing incomes and falling inequality. “The Keynesian problem was no longer a problem,” says the University of Michigan’s Mark Mizruchi, the author of The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite. The chief concern now was raging inflation, which many attributed to a “wage-price spiral.”

Forty years later, “the Keynesian problem” appears to have returned. “Increased inequality contributes to . . . insufficient aggregate demand—too little spending by consumers and businesses to keep GDP at its capacity,” the Commission on Inclusive Prosperity, co-chaired by Summers, warned in January.

Indeed, all of this shows us that what goes around comes around—just like the money in people’s paychecks.

Rick Wartzman is the executive director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University. The author or editor of five books, he is currently writing a narrative history of how the social contract between employer and employee in America has changed since the end of World War II.

The myth of the 1% and the 99%

Michael Kazin, co-editor of the left-wing magazine Dissent, posed a simple question in a recent article: If wealth and income inequality levels are as bad as they are portrayed in popular media, “why aren’t people taking to the streets?”

The statistics that describe the magnitude of economic inequality are stark. Before taking into account the effects of redistributive government programs, the richest 1% of Americans make 20% of the income. Wealth inequality is even more extreme, with a recent study estimating that in America, the wealthiest 160,000 families have as much as the poorest 145 million families.

Such figures are rallying points for a specific strain of economic populism in America, manifested most saliently in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Occupy brought to the fore the idea that the nation is divided between a small group of haves and an increasingly large group of have-nots.

But if this is really the case, why aren’t Americans taking to the streets? They are not rioting, or even organizing to demand that the government solve the problems of inequality. And, in fact, poll numbers suggest Americans believe the government spends too much on the poor or is otherwise too involved in the economy.

Why do the statistics that supposedly describe the economic reality and Americans perceptions of that reality differ so much? For one, government programs do help—to a degree—cushion economic blows and redistribute wealth. But more importantly, the statistics that are trumpeted in much of the media do a poor job of describing the fluidity of the American economy.

A study published in January by sociologists Thomas Hirschl of Cornell University and Mark Rank of Washington University paints a much more nuanced picture. They use data from the government-sponsored Panel Study on Income Dynamics (PSID), which interviewed thousands of families from 1968 through 2011 to understand how these families’ economic fortunes evolved over time. The data paints a picture of a fluid economic order.

PSID data show that by age 60:

- 70% of the population will have experienced at least one year within the top 20th percentile of income;

- 53% of the population will have experienced at least one year within the top 10th percentile of income; and

- 11.1% of the population will have found themselves in the much-maligned 1% of earners for at least one year of their lives.

At the same time, it’s much more rare for a person to reach the top 1% and stay there. According to PSID data, only 0.6% of the population will experience 10 consecutive years in the top 1% of earners.

The fluidity cuts both ways. Rank and Hirschl pointed out in their 2014 book Chasing the American Dream that some 45% of Americans will take advantage of a need-based welfare program, like Medicaid or food stamps, by age 60. And 54% of Americans will experience at least one year of poverty by the same age.

Just because there is a good deal of changeability in America’s class structure, that doesn’t mean that everyone has the same chances at achieving high levels of income. Compared with many of its wealthy peers, there is much less inter-generational economic mobility in the U.S. If you are born poor in America, you have a much greater chance of staying poor than if you were born into the same class in places like Canada or Denmark.

But in the American economy, a given individual will experience a wide array of economic circumstances throughout their lives. This is why, for instance, aspirational advertising campaigns are so effective: because millions of Americans really do climb the economic ladder over the course of their lives.

This insight is also useful in politics. Liberals often marvel at the phenomenon of citizens in conservative states who vote “against their own economic interests.” But many of these people may very well have been in the top tiers of earners at some point in their lives, and they may expect to get back to that lofty perch again.

Income and wealth inequality will continue to shape the world for years to come, and they are not issues the business community can ignore. But when you take a closer look at the data, you see that class in America is much more complicated than a simple story of the 1% against the 99%. Why aren’t Americans taking to the streets, ready to fight the next class war? It’s because many of us wouldn’t know which side we’re on.

Wealth inequality in America: It’s worse than you think

For the true believers in laissez faire economic policy, the recent and ongoing national discussion over income and wealth inequality probably seems like it was started as a cynical ploy for those on the left to gain a political advantage. After all, if rising inequality is a problem, you would be hard pressed to find any solutions offered by the right wing.

It would be laughable to argue that left-leaning politicians aren’t using the issue for political advantage. But focusing on that fact alone misses one of the main reasons we have begun to pay more attention to inequality, which is the fact that we have better tools for measuring and understanding inequality than ever before. This is thanks to the work of economists like Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, who have dedicated their careers to compiling and analyzing wealth and income data. Without these numbers, advocates for concerted effort to combat inequality would have no foundation for their argument.

Saez and Zucman released another working paper this week, which studies capitalized income data to get a picture of how wealth inequality in America, rather than income inequality, has evolved since 1913. (Income inequality describes the gap in how much individuals earn from the work they do and the investments they make. Wealth inequality measures the difference in how much money and other assets individuals have accumulated altogether.) In a blog post at the London School of Economics explaining the paper, Saez and Zucman write:

There is no dispute that income inequality has been on the rise in the United States for the past four decades. The share of total income earned by the top 1 percent of families was less than 10 percent in the late 1970s but now exceeds 20 percent as of the end of 2012. A large portion of this increase is due to an upsurge in the labor incomes earned by senior company executives and successful entrepreneurs. But is the rise in U.S. economic inequality purely a matter of rising labor compensation at the top, or did wealth inequality rise as well?

The advent of the income tax has made measuring income much easier for economists, but measuring wealth is not as easy. To solve the problem of not having detailed government records of wealth, Saez and Zucman developed a method of capitalizing income records to estimate wealth distribution. They write:

Wealth inequality, it turns out, has followed a spectacular U-shape evolution over the past 100 years. From the Great Depression in the 1930s through the late 1970s there was a substantial democratization of wealth. The trend then inverted, with the share of total household wealth owned by the top 0.1 percent increasing to 22 percent in 2012 from 7 percent in the late 1970s. The top 0.1 percent includes 160,000 families with total net assets of more than $20 million in 2012.

Saez and Zucman show that, in America, the wealthiest 160,000 families own as much wealth as the poorest 145 million families, and that wealth is about 10 times as unequal as income. They argue that the drastic rise in wealth inequality has occurred for the same reasons as income inequality; namely, the trend of making taxes less progressive since the 1970s, and a changing job market that has forced many blue collar workers to compete with cheaper labor abroad. But wealth inequality specifically is affected by a lack of saving by the middle class. Stagnant wage growth makes it difficult for middle and lower class workers to set aside money, but Saez and Zucman argue that the trend could also be a product of the ease at which people are able to get into debt, writing:

Financial deregulation may have expanded borrowing opportunities (through consumer credit, home equity loans, subprime mortgages) and in some cases might have left consumers insufficiently protected against some forms of predatory lending. In that case, greater consumer protection and financial regulation could help increasing middle-class saving. Tuition increases may have increased student loans, in which case limits to university tuition fees may have a role to play.

So, why should we care that wealth inequality is so much greater than even the historic levels of income inequality? While inequality is a natural result of competitive, capitalist economies, there’s plenty of evidence that shows that extreme levels of inequality is bad for business. For instance, retailers are once again bracing for a miserable holiday shopping season due mostly to the fact that most Americans simply aren’t seeing their incomes rise and have learned their lesson about the consequences of augmenting their income with debt. Unless your business caters to the richest of the rich, opportunities for real growth are scarce.

Furthermore, there’s reason to believe that such levels of inequality can have even worse consequences. The late historian Tony Judt addressed these effects in Ill Fares the Land, a book on the consequences of the financial crisis, writing:

There has been a collapse in intergenerational mobility: in contrast to their parents and grandparents, children today in the UK as in the US have very little expectation of improving upon the condition into which they were born. The poor stay poor. Economic disadvantage for the overwhelming majority translates into ill health, missed educational opportunity, and—increasingly—the familiar symptoms of depression: alcoholism, obesity, gambling, and minor criminality.

In other words, there’s evidence that rising inequality and many other intractable social problems are related. Not only is rising inequality bad for business, it’s bad for society, too.

If the U.S. economy is so good, why do we feel so bad?

When Americans head to the polls next week, many will vote for congressional candidates who promise to fix the economy. In fact, the economy is “very important” to the majority of registered voters and outstrips any other issue, including health care and terrorism, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center.

The sad reality, however, is that these voters won’t get what they want, no matter who ultimately heads to Washington, namely because too many Americans have developed a nasty case of economic hypochondria. How can any politician fix what isn’t really broken?

It has been more than five years since America emerged from the Great Recession, and most economic indicators have improved ever since. GDP climbed by 4.6% last quarter, which is tied for the best mark since 2007. The national unemployment rate fell to 5.9% in September, which not only is its best mark since 2008 but is actually lower than it was for most of the 1980s. Even the number of long-term unemployed has been cut by more than a quarter over the past year. Gas prices are way down, and the stock markets, despite some recent volatility, are hanging around record highs.

All those factors have led 42% of Americans to say they’re in “excellent or good” financial shape, according to another Pew poll. The trouble is that only 21% of respondents in the same poll say the economy is in “good or excellent” condition. This disconnect is also reflected when 56% expect their personal finances to improve over the next year, but only 22% expect economic improvement over the same period.

And then there’s this stunner: According to a summer poll by the Public Religion Research Institute, 72% of Americans still think we’re in a recession, down just barely from 76% when the same question was asked in 2012.

A CASE OF THE BLAHS A poll by the Pew Research Center found that three-quarters of Americans believe the economy will be either the same or worse a year from now.Graphic Source: Pew Research Center

I’ve come up with three explanations for this massive disconnect, in ascending order of importance.

SHELL SHOCK. Most American adults had experienced economic downturns before 2008, but few had experienced anything quite as severe or wide ranging as the Great Recession. It’s the sort of thing that some people just can’t get over; many put up mental defenses to make sure they don’t get fooled again. It’s both totally understandable and thoroughly illogical.

Yours truly. We media folks also don’t like getting egg on our faces, and you could have cooked a lifetime of omelets on our foreheads in 2008. So we keep predicting that bubbles will burst. Plus, bad news sells better than good news. So we overplay the high unemployment figures and underplay the low ones. We explain that top-line figures like unemployment rates aren’t really reflective of the current environment, but we use the exact same measurements when nostalgically harking back to economic boom times.

Political calculus. In theory, both political parties should claim ownership of economic improvements. But rather than advocate for a continuation of current policy, each party has determined that the smarter electoral strategy is to claim that everything is awful and the other side’s fault. That is true of both incumbents and challengers. Rather than “Our policies helped you find a job,” we hear “You can’t get work because we aren’t able to implement our policies.” Even if a voter has a good job with gold-plated benefits, he remains immersed in political discourse about those who don’t.

You may think I’m waving pompoms past the economic graveyard. But I’m no cockeyed cheerleader. In fact, I’m downright pessimistic. The less we are willing to recognize the economy we have, the more likely we are to elect representatives who stoke economic fear because they have little else to offer. And if that happens, we will indeed end up with a lousy economy.

The economic imbalance fueling Ferguson’s unrest

Until the violence broke out last week, it appeared that things had been looking up in Ferguson, Mo., economically speaking.

Foreclosures were down 80%, to just 1% of all houses in the city. The unemployment rate was dropping, and had been below the national average for a while. A number of small businesses had opened in Ferguson’s revitalized downtown, including a bike shop and a wine bar. There is a thriving farmers’ market on Saturdays.

But while the Ferguson and St. Louis region economies were on the upswing, the gains weren’t equally shared. That’s true everywhere in America, where the rich have bounced back from the recession much faster than the poor. But the gains were particularly unequal in Ferguson and its surrounding areas. The unemployment rate for African Americans in the nearby county of St. Louis City was 26% in 2012, according to the Census Department’s latest available stats on employment and race in the area. For white Americans, the unemployment rate was just 6.2%.

These days, income inequality, it seems, is blamed for nearly all social and economic woes. Studies link income inequality to lower infant mortality rates, higher crime rates, and lower economic growth. But it’s not always the evil people think it is. There are a number of areas of the country with income equality—poor, rural areas, for instance—that also have persistently high unemployment rates and no growth. On the flip side, New York City is the most unequal city in America in terms of income, and also one of the most economically dynamic. And while the Occupy Wall Street protests focused on inequality, the outrage in Ferguson, at least on the surface, appears to be about something else entirely: namely, the killing by police of 18-year-old Michael Brown.

Still, St. Louis’ 20 percentage point gap between the unemployment rate of African Americans and white Americans is the largest of any city in America, according to the Census. So, the fact that protests against the treatment of black Americans have erupted there is not a coincidence.

“The level of inequality is not the cause of the problems in Ferguson,” says Larry Mishel, the director of the Economic Policy Institute. “But it’s definitely part of the frustrations.”

Typically, economists measure income inequality using a metric called the Gini coefficient. A score of zero means everyone has exactly the same income. A score of one represents the other extreme. According to the U.S. Census’ latest available figures, St. Louis had a Gini coefficient of 0.52, tied with Miami and lower than (i.e. not as unequal) as New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco. St. Louis County—the larger area around St. Louis, where Ferguson is located—has a lower Gini of 0.48, but it’s still higher than the national average of 0.45.

Income inequality and racial inequality don’t always go hand in hand. Mishel says differences in income between black and white Americans are about the same as they were three decades ago. Yet at the same time, income equality in the country has grown dramatically for everyone. But remember, the fact that members of different races in America continue to receive different, unequal economic opportunities has contributed to the rise in income inequality overall.

Ferguson is a mostly blue collar town, and it is poorer than the St. Louis area in general, particularly compared to nearby Brentwood, a wealthier, predominately white neighborhood. The median household income in Ferguson is $44,000 compared to $75,000 for St. Louis as a whole. The demographics of Ferguson show how the St. Louis area remains segregated. Feguson’s African American share of the overall city population has grown to 66% in 2012, from 52% in 2000.

Like almost all cities in the U.S., manufacturing jobs have moved out of St. Louis, and a number of auto plants have shut their doors. But St. Louis has been able to retain a number of large employers. Emerson Electric EMR, which ranks 121 on the Fortune 500, is based in Ferguson. Boeing BA and Express Scripts ESRX have large offices and facilities nearby.

St. Louis overall has fared better than many other cities in America. But St. Louis’ African American community has, for the most part, not benefitted. So yes, America needs to address the fact that there is a perception, and perhaps a reality, of institutionalize police aggression toward African Americans. But until you figure out how to fix the fact that the U.S. economy treats African Americans and whites unequally the tensions that erupted in Ferguson will continue to be there.

When corruption is good for the economy

Americans, and citizens around the world, have corruption on the mind.

A recent Gallup poll showed that from 2006 to 2013, the percentage of Americans who believe “corruption is widespread throughout the government” has increased from 59% to 79%, while a separate poll showed that majorities in 108 of 129 countries agree.

Economist Jakob Svensson has defined corruption as the misuse of public office for private gain and, by this definition, it’s easy to see why it upsets us so much, as it constitutes a theft of resources that belong to all of us. And when corruption is widespread, it can have devastating effects on a society. In a paper published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Svensson surveys the literature on the economic effects of corruption, and they can be severe. He notes that there is a strong negative correlation between the wealth of a nation and its level of corruption, and that this corruption often harms the poorest in a society. Svensson offers several recent examples of such egregious malfeasance:

A conservative estimate is that the former President of Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko, looted the treasury of some $5 billion…. The funds allegedly embezzled by the former presidents of Indonesia and Philippines, Mohamed Suharto and Ferdinand Marcos, are estimated to be two and seven times higher…. An internal IMF report found that nearly $1 billion of oil reserves, or $77 per capita, vanished from the Angolan state coffers in 2001 alone. This was about three times the value of the humanitarian aid received by Angola in 2001—in a country where three-quarters of the population survives on less than $1 a day and where one in three children die before the age of five.

Of course, most corruption is nowhere near as outrageous, and there are times when the presence of corruption can actually lead to just outcomes. According to Chris Blattman, an associate professor of political science at Columbia University, this might be why economists have not been able to link levels of corruption to growth rates. While overall wealth is associated with lower levels of corruption, there is very little evidence that corruption leads to slower economic growth. Writes Blattman:

Why might this be so? One reason: Most of us fail to imagine that corruption can also grease the wheels of prosperity. Yet in places where bureaucracies and organizations are inefficient (meaning entrepreneurs and big firms struggle to transport or export or comply with regulation), corruption could improve efficiency and growth. Bribes can act like a piece rate or price discrimination, and give faster or better service to the firms with highest opportunity cost of waiting.

Could this seemingly benign corruption be helpful in the U.S.? In an article in this week’s New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell, without necessarily calling it corruption, argues it could, as he compares the Italian Mafia of the early 20th century with organized crime in cities today. Gladwell argues that throughout American history, waves of immigrants were denied access to the sorts of institutions that would have enabled upward mobility, and when that happened, these groups turned to crime, what sociologist James O’Kane calls “the crooked ladder.”

But, in the 1970s, as the U.S. government got serious about cracking down on organized crime in general and the drug trade in particular, that crooked ladder was destroyed, leaving today’s downtrodden minorities with one fewer avenue to gain wealth. It was once common to bribe police officers to turn a blind eye to the drug trade, illegal gambling, and prostitution. But America’s zeal for stamping out crime and vice has transformed the unwritten armistice between organized crime and the authorities to an all-out war, in which minority youth are imprisoned and subsequently forced back into a life of crime due to the stigma against felons.

On a national level, we can see how corruption can actually make Congress more efficient. For four years, the House of Representatives has been operating under a ban of so-called “earmarks,” or spending provisions tacked on to a larger bill that fund pet projects of a specific congressman that bill sponsors are trying to woo. This is, of course, bribery by any other name: “Vote for this bill and we’ll give you something you want.” At the same time, since earmarks have been banned, Congress has been unable to get much of anything done, leading politicians on both sides of the aisle and countlesscommentatorsto beg for their return.

Most of the time, corrupt officials are like parasites that feed off society and benefit only themselves. Furthermore, as corruption becomes more prevelant, ethical people lose faith in the system and are sapped of their drive to work honestly. But it’s important to understand that because we live in an imperfect world, a bit of controlled corruption can function as a lubricant to overcome some of our worst problems.

Debate over Piketty’s inequality data is missing the point

FORTUNE — The only thing more fallacious than damn lies are statistics, or so the saying goes.

This notion was on full display this weekend, after Financial Times economics editor Chris Giles published a blog post calling into question data used by economist Thomas Piketty in his best-selling work Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Giles’ analysis found several mistakes in Piketty’s data, mistakes which put to doubt whether there has been an observable increase in wealth inequality in Europe and the United States over the past 30 years.

Piketty’s book asserts that the concentration of wealth in capitalist societies naturally grows more extreme, especially in times of low population and economic growth, so the possibility that wealth concentration hasn’t really increased in the past 30 years does throw some cold water on the economist’s overarching theory.

Many of Piketty and Giles’ disagreements come down to interpretation of incomplete data. One of the parts of the book that impressed economists so much was Piketty’s painstaking assemblage and exploitation of years of wealth data across countries and time periods. It is not surprising, given the fact that wealth data is much less plentiful and uniform than other statistics, that there would be disagreements over what exactly these data say.

After all, Americans have not been particularly swayed by arguments concerning inequality. If anything is clear from reading Piketty’s book, it’s that capitalist economies tend to be deeply unequal societies, even following World War II, when income inequality was at its lowest levels. But only in recent years, after it became clear that the average family hasn’t gotten richer over the past generation (and that the housing bubble hit hardest those families leaning on rising home prices to compensate for this fact) that Americans started to grow dissatisfied with the distribution of wealth and income.

The above Gallup poll shows a clear trend of growing pessimism among Americans about the economy.

Debates over whether or not capitalism leads to increasing inequality, as Piketty asserts in his book, or leads to decreasing inequality, as economists had once thought, are worthwhile. But most Americans are simply concerned with whether they can feel themselves getting richer and if they have a fair shot at prosperity and security. The data clearly show that economic growth right now is being captured by the very rich, while the rest of the country is struggling to figure out how to pay for education, healthcare, and retirement.

It’s against this backdrop that policy makers need to decide how to make entitlement programs sustainable going forward, that the wealthy must decide how much of their money to give to charity, and that business leaders must decide how much to pay their workers. It’s difficult to see how small disagreements over trends in wealth concentration could affect these decisions.